T.X. Watson's Pre-EVENT blog

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I apparently missed this story in April, but Valve's employee orientation handbook leaked -- and it describes the coolest workplace ever.

It's a very pretty handbook, first of all. This doesn't look like someone scanned a stack of papers they found in a photocopier tray. It's drenched in Valve's company philosophy, which is all based around not letting anyone be in charge -- or, maybe more accurately, putting everyone in charge.

With just a little bit of tweaking, the handbook could be used not just as an orientation guide to fit into Valve's workplace culture, but as a set of instructions on how to be a good person[1. if we assume good means useful.].

My favorite part was the hiring guide. Since everyone at Valve has the authority to hire new people, and, indeed, to do basically whatever they want with the company resources, they place hiring above absolutely everything else in scale of importance.

The guide for what kind of people they're looking for also looks quite a lot like a guide for what sort of person one should strive to be, in order to maximize one's contribution to the world around oneself. They say they're looking for T-shaped people:

The horizontal part of the T represents a broad range of general competence -- the person should be reasonably good at a whole bunch of things. The vertical part represents deep expertise -- there should be something that person can contribute at a higher level of quality than pretty much everyone else.

Check it out -- it's a really cool read, whether you want to work for Valve or not. (I kinda do, now.)